2021 to 2025

• Jellicoe Street at Kent Avenue Rail Crossing - Location, Virtual Visit
• Union and Venables Rail Crossings
  • Union, Virtual Visit
  • Venables, Virtual Visit
• Fraser Street at Kent Avenue Rail Crossing - Location, Virtual Visit

Rail

Sidewalks, crosswalks, and civil engineering to support installation of flashing-lights-bells-and-gates along CN track corridor with City of Vancouver.

Jellicoe Crossing

The final result is functional and could have turned out better. I learned three things working on Jellicoe Crossing

• construction activities for small-footprint projects happen very quickly and need daily monitoring, even with schedule sharing

• available plastic tactile surface warning strips have fixed curvatures which may clash with your intersection geometry; coordinate about the product's curvature to maintain quality of finish without risking wasted materials

• your model for small sites must allow you to rapidly turn around adjustments to City feedback - tight footprints limit how you deliver grading suitable for universal accessibility (slope along the path, cross-fall, ramp wings)

We started off with two crossing projects on the rail corridor along Kent Avenue (Main Street and Jellicoe Street). Thomas Schwabenbauer carried Main Street and I carried Jellicoe Street.

City of Vancouver has a program that uses Transport Canada funding to make locations safer for people to cross the rail tracks. City staff had designed the concepts and we won the work to develop the design for construction. We were the engineers of record while others in our team built the required models and representations in CADD to provide the design drawings.

We scheduled our work to happen after the rail corridor owner installed crossing panels so that the finished surface for the overall street would smoothly correspond to the panel edges.

Safety improvements at the crossing include

• tactile surface warning indicators marking where people must stop and check for trains or automobiles
• barrier curb and gutter setting an edge for the driving lane and rain run-off
• sidewalk replacement to remove tripping hazards from cracks and separations

Jellicoe Street crossing connects many people at Lighthouse Terrace and Fraserview Housing to Kent Avenue Greenway and Southeast Marine Drive.

Union and Venables Crossings

When modelling a street surface, small-footprint designs require what designers could call a nitpicky construction. That's OK.

Assembling a mesh point-by-point across a 20 metre long site including some top and bottom of curb can involve a few dozen points. For such tight and small sites, forcing tools to give you what you need that require a lot of time to set up takes longer than sculpting what you want in a dumb 3-D mesh.

Union and Venables are similar to the work at Jellicoe with four complications:

1. Work involves adding gates to active signals (Flashing Lights Bells and Gates)
2. City intends Union Avenue improvements to last only long enough for approval and installation of a grade-separated crossing
3. City added additional sidewalk upgrade for Union once we completed the design
4. Grading Venables sidewalk had to keep the elevations for the existing water meter and edge of building

These crossings are close enough to the Centennial Terminals rail yard (CenTerm) that trains must occupy the crossings when parking the cars or preparing train to leave the terminal.

Making room for the gates involves replacing the current rail signals with new gates and signals at locations further from the tracks to keep a safe gap between stopped traffic and trains. This also triggers minor adjustments to the sidewalks and utility pole anchors.

At Union Avenue, saving sidewalk upgrades for later meant that the design requires concrete roadside barriers to separate the vehicle space from the walking space.

For track improvements, the rail owner will install concrete crossing panels to prevent the pavement around the tracks from settling and creating a bump. We adjusted the grading for the street travelled lanes and sidewalks to smoothly fit the wider crossing between the differently elevated adjacent cross-streets (Raymur Street and Glen Street). Raymur intersection is roughly 5.5 metres; Glen is nearly 6.8 metres; and the tracks are virtually level at 6.3 metres.

At Venables Avenue, a major street in the City network, we designed sidewalk upgrades for the south side of the intersection which included a neckdown or traffic bulge for Glen Street. The grading challenge at this location was fitting grading suitable for universal accessibility and limiting need to replace the existing water meter chamber.

Fraser Crossing

Fraser Street crosses Kent Avenue in an extremely flat part of Vancouver where the rail corridor also includes a medium voltage distribution line.

Key constraints for this design included

• fitting sidewalks around the signal poles we needed to install and existing distribution poles
• keeping rain run-off from accumulating in the walking paths
• minimizing the footprint for repaving travelled lanes